In this week’s blog post, I want to expand on a possible contention I found when comparing the Ruckenstein & Dow Schull and Miller readings that I am a bit stuck on. On page 670, Ruckenstein & Dow Schull argue that relations displayed through social media, in the form of big data, are not the same as kinship structures. They also state that the ability to represent relationships between people as a graph or chart does not mean that they convey equivalent information. I understand the point they are making: as data pushes for a person to be a pixelated phenomenon, it could create a different context of a person in terms of their relationships to other people. However, the discipline of anthropology has been thinking about people and relationships for a long time, and views the person not as a discrete, isolated thing, but as an aggregation of their relationships.
I’ll contrast this to the conversation we had yesterday, in which we discussed how anthropology could be the inspiration to see how different networks are mobilized and activated in different ways for social networking sites. Miller argues against the idea that, “Internet-based networks were too dispersed and partial to equate with these older forms of sociality” and states that, “rather, SNS have turned out to be something much closer to older traditions of anthropological study of social relations such as kinship studies” (Miller). Kimberly even provided us with some ethnographic examples of how social media can be utilized as an aggregation of relationships, such as those formed through the Leonardo DiCaprio fan club.
I think both of these authors use context as an argument in two different ways: Miller sees that social networking sites “reflect an aggregate of an individual’s private spheres” which is similar to kinships structures, while Ruckenstein & Dow Schull view social networking sites, and the data that come from them, as segmentations of a person. I’m struggling with how to bridge this difference; how can we think of social media as both an aggregate of relationships but also as pixelations of a person?
Lauren – this is a very rich question. I wonder if you this would be resolved, or take you somewhere productive, if the question did take the person as the starting point, or as the unit. Instead, starting with varying forms of networks or aggregations where differing roles can be activated at various nodes – public, private, both, somewhere in between – might enable the contradiction to be generative and reflective of actual social facts rather than dead ending in a bounded person. Further, even persons at different nodes can enact different relationships in the same network – even in the same household at once (e.g mother, aunt, sister, cousin, etc.). As Miller says people themselves are social network sites. I also this is the kind of logic that Miller and Horst are using in their essay we read a number of weeks ago which enable contradictions to be fundamental and generative.